You cannot have more than one delimiter: if you specify something like -d ",;:"
, some implementations will use only the first character as a delimiter (in this case, the comma.) Other implementations (e.g. GNU cut
) will give you an error message.
$ cut -d ",;:" -f2 <<<"J.Smith,1 Main Road,cell:1234567890;land:4081234567"
cut: the delimiter must be a single character
Try `cut --help' for more information.